The Semantic Web is an evolving collection of knowledge, which provides information on the Internet, or World Wide Web in such a way that it can be readily used by intelligent agents and other computer programs. Information on the Semantic Web, rather than being in natural language text, can be maintained in a structured that both computers and people can work with. The Resource Description Framework (RDF) from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) underlies most Semantic Web efforts. RDF consists of statements (subject/predicate/object triples) made about instances of specific classes (similar to an object-oriented programming language).
The Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a general framework for how to describe an Internet resource such as a Web site and its content. An Internet resource is defined herein as a resource with a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI), including the Uniform Resource Locators (URL) that identify Web sites as well as specific Web pages. As with known HyperText Markup Language (HTML) META tags, the RDF description statements, encased as part of an Extensible Markup Language (XML) section, can be included within a Web page (HTML file), or can be in separate files.
In performing Web searches, users can input a word or short phrase to a search engine and obtain listing of sites containing the words, or phrase, or portions thereof. The listings can include titles and portions of text from the Web sites containing the search term(s). The titles and text portions provide the user with limited insight into the contextual framework of the Web sites in the listings. Further, the listings generally do not group the results in terms of context. In order to find those sites having meaningful results within the user's context the user can scan multiple pages of listings based only on the titles and short snippets of text from the sites. Current search engines also do not take advantage of the rich contextual information provided by RDF statements of Semantic Web sites.